Interview with Brian Kent of Laffey, Bucci & Kent - Part III

Brian Kent is a personal injury lawyer and co-founder of the law firm Laffey, Bucci & Kent. Based in Pennsylvania, Laffey, Bucci & Kent represents a wide variety of clients who may have experienced injuries as a result of factors such as an unsafe workplace, defective product, auto accident, crime, or medical malpractice. Brian has helped numerous clients reach million-dollar settlements in personal injury cases. In 2008, he who was named a Legal Intelligencer “Lawyer on the Fast Track,” and he has appeared in the Pennsylvania Super Lawyers list for eight years running.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you tell us about any high-profile cases you’re handling at the moment?

BRIAN KENT: We’re currently handling the case of Father Andrew McCormick. Father McCormick was a priest at St. John Cantius in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia. He sexually abused a 10-year-old boy who was an altar boy at the school, and we’re representing that boy. There were two criminal trials that occurred in the past couple years where both criminal juries wound up not being able to reach a verdict; they were hung juries. We are coming to the conclusion of the civil case, but I think the evidence that we have unearthed with regards to Father McCormick and his background, as well as the archdiocese’s knowledge of propensities that he had in terms of sexual urges towards kids and their failure to do anything about it, is going to have a pretty big impact on his ability to ever be around kids again.

That case should probably turn over this year, and we have our Sandusky case that we’re handling as well. Our client was abused by Jerry Sandusky in 2007. There has not been a law firm or attorney to depose Jerry Sandusky, and we’re doing so in two weeks at the prison in Somerset. And given the recent criminal convictions of Graham Spanier, and the guilty pleas of Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, we’re hoping that a Philadelphia Jury can finally assess Jerry Sandusky and Penn State and what they should have to be responsible for, because nobody’s done that yet. Considering this is probably one of the last victims out there, we’re hoping that somebody takes it seriously because we don’t think the school or Jerry Sandusky has done so yet.

Q. Aside from your work with clients, how does the firm give back to the Pennsylvania community?

A. One keystone of our firm is giving back to the community and to the folks that also help us. We are a corporate sponsor of Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, which is an organization that is responsible for interviewing kids, medical care for kids. It’s a place where police, medical personnel, therapists, and obviously children and youth, can all get together when there’s an allegation of abuse that occurs, to minimize the impact on the child, so that there’s only one interview by all of these different agencies that happen. That’s one organization that we are heavily involved in.

I just came last night from a benefit for an organization called Cuddle My Kids, which is a charity that goes into the homes of families that are dealing with cancer and have a parent that is undergoing treatment for cancer. They go in and play with the kids and help the kids so that their lives are less impacted by what’s going on. My partner’s wife is on the board and heavily involved in that, so we do a lot of work with them.

We are in the process of establishing a charitable organization in our firm, where we are sending at least one family to Disney World for a week—a family who has a child that has been abused—so they can just not think or forget about what’s happened to them and just be a kid. That’s in the process of being set up now, and we have a lot of visions for expanding that to include more families and more kids—to at least to give them a freedom for a week away from thinking about anything that may have happened to them and just to act like a kid in that regard. That’s just a glimpse of some of the charitable and community organizations that we’re involved in.

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